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Oracle's been selling business software to its database customers for years.

Now SAP has struck back in a big way, announcing that its flagship Business Suite software, used by companies to crunch financials and manage operations, now runs on SAP's own Hana database.

That means that these customers can leave Oracle entirely, if they want to.

SAP's Hana, what's called an in-memory database, has been one of the company's fastest-growing products of all time. That's because it can crunch numbers from an enormous database almost instantly, instead of the hours or days it can take with traditional databases, like Oracle or IBM DB2.

But the company didn't integrate Hana into its own SAP applications right away. It knew that its customers were not going to take on the pain, expense, and risk of dumping critical business databases in favor of an untested new product.